


Lift Me Up

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Drugs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene for 5x04: Neal and the Burkes, and the next morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lift Me Up

**Author's Note:**

> For my h/c bingo "counseling" square. (Yes, I'm stretching a bit, but I think it fits well enough -- in two different ways!)

Neal looked so innocent when he was sleeping. Peter had noticed this the first time he'd ever seen Neal sleep, which, as it happened, was also the first time Neal had gotten drugged on his watch. After their narrow escape from the Howser Clinic, Neal had fallen asleep in the car. Peter had waited to wake him until pulling up outside the townhouse. Neal had awakened grouchy and achy and no longer quite so out of it, but Peter never forgot the disconcerting experience of watching Neal's walls fall away, revealing someone who was _like_ the Neal he knew and yet different.

By now, of course, he'd seen Neal sleep plenty of times under different circumstances -- on long undercover assignments, in the surveillance van, in Cape Verde. And he hadn't really thought about it in awhile, the way that Neal's defenses dropped when he was asleep, leaving him looking vulnerable and startlingly young.

El came back while Peter was still gazing down at Neal. "Oh, is Mozzie gone already? I was going to make him a cup of tea."

"Yeah, he took off," Peter said absently.

"Too bad. I'll have to bring tea to our next book club meeting." El laced her fingers through Peter's and stood with him for a moment, contemplating Neal on the couch. "Did you ever think he looks so --"

"Innocent?"

"That, yes, and ... like a kid, almost." Her face had gone soft and gentle.

"But he's _not,_ El. He's a grown man who's made a lot of bad decisions." He stopped himself short of saying the _other_ part of it, because he wasn't even willing to discuss that with El yet. Peter was increasingly worried that Neal might have gotten himself mixed up in some seriously bad stuff this time. He _couldn't_ be directly involved with Siegel's murder, Peter couldn't believe that, but Neal did know something about it. If nothing else, this evening had confirmed that.

As well as dropping confessions to dozens of different crimes, some of which he'd had no idea Neal was even involved in. 

The really annoying thing was that it had stopped even being a question of turning Neal in for that sort of thing. Of course he wasn't going to say anything, just file it away in the "Caffrey" part of his brain.

He should probably worry about that.

"I know he's not," El said. She brushed a thumb lightly over his knuckles. "He'll be okay."

"If Mozzie didn't poison him by accident."

"I don't mean that," she said quietly. "Whatever's going on with him, he'll get through it. And if he needs help, you'll be there."

After a moment's silence, she added, "Were you planning to just leave him there?"

"He's got a blanket on him."

She gave him a look. "He's going to wake up with a horrible backache. Especially as relaxed as he is right now."

She had a point. Peter grasped Neal's ankles and lifted his feet onto the couch. Then he studied his handiwork. Neal was now contorted like a pretzel to fit. It still didn't look comfortable.

"Guest bedroom?" Peter said. 

"I think that sounds good."

They manhandled a floppy and semiconscious Neal up the stairs. He woke up enough to tell El that her hair smelled nice and then draped himself over Peter's shoulder and started mumbling a long, convoluted story about forging bus passes in the second grade.

They got him to the bedroom, somehow -- Peter's back was never going to forgive him -- and let him slide into a puddle on the bed. Peter was reminded of dealing with drunken roommates in college.

"I'll go put out some clean towels," El said, and discreetly vanished.

Peter sighed, undid Neal's shoes and pulled off his socks. He thought about taking off the pants too, but that just felt weird, although Neal would probably be more comfortable that way.

Putting him on top of the bed with the covers pulled up had been, in retrospect, a mistake. Peter thought about calling El back in, then decided he could deal with it on his own. He gathered up a sloppy armful of Neal and tried to roll him to one side while pulling down the blankets.

He'd thought Neal was out completely until Neal said in his ear, "Peter?"

"Yeah?" Peter grunted. Neal was totally limp; it felt like he was composed of twice the usual number of limbs, going every direction.

"Where am I?"

"Our guest bedroom," Peter said. "A little help here?"

"What?" Neal mumbled. He flailed in an experimental kind of way, managing to poke Peter in the eye.

"I take it back. _Stop_ helping," Peter ordered, and Neal went slack again. Peter finally managed to get the blankets pulled back, with one arm clasped around Neal's rib cage to hold him out of the way.

"Peter?"

"What," Peter sighed, rolling Neal back onto the sheet.

"Am I a bad person?"

Peter paused in the act of trying to get Neal arranged on the bed so that he looked less like a tangled-up rag doll and more like a human being with a properly aligned spine. "What?"

"I think I'm a bad person, probably," Neal said. His face was twisted to one side and pressed into the pillow. "I do bad things and I don't mean to do bad things, I really don't, but they kind of happen and people get hurt and I think there's probably something broken in me that makes me do them but I don't know how not to, Peter, I don't know how not to be me."

"Neal," Peter said helplessly. He wasn't sure if it made it worse or better that Neal probably wouldn't remember a word of this conversation in the morning.

Neal was still rattling on. "And I don't know what it is that doesn't work in me, because obviously there is something in most people that makes them not do those things and, and I think there's some part of me that thought going to Dr. Summers would actually help me figure it out even though, you know, I knew all along it was a con and I was going to be conning her and she was going to be conning me, but I still thought --"

"Neal, please stop talking," Peter said. His heart hurt.

"-- and you know, I never thought of therapy to help with that, which I guess is just as well because it didn't help, it was kind of the opposite of helping actually, because she told me I'm a sociopath and --"

Peter laid a hand across Neal's lips to stop the flow of words. "Neal, stop, _please._ You're not a bad person," he said, feeling his way along slowly, like groping through an unfamiliar room in the dark. "You've done bad things, it's true. You've broken the law, a _lot_ , for good reasons and bad ones, and I wouldn't be doing you any favors to ignore that." He could feel Neal breathing against his palm, a light flutter of warmth. "I hate having these conversations. I don't want you to stop being you. I _like_ you. I just want to you to _think_ a little bit sometimes, because you do things like, well, like _this_ and then .... er, Neal?"

Neal's eyes were closed. Peter prodded him gently. He'd fallen back asleep.

"Well, you wouldn't remember anyway," Peter said softly. He pulled up the blankets and touched Neal's face lightly before leaving him alone.

 

****

 

Neal cracked an eye open. Light stabbed into his brain. He closed his eyes, buried his head in his pillow, and wondered if he was going to die.

After a few minutes, the realization slowly percolated through his misery that this wasn't _his_ pillow. He raised his head muzzily and squinted around. His brain didn't seem to be working properly for some reason, but after some deep thought he recognized this as the Burkes' guest bedroom.

That ... didn't seem good.

He slowly and painfully extricated himself from the bed, one body part at a time. The clock on the bedside table read 6:45. The door was cracked open and faint cooking smells wafted up from downstairs, which made his stomach roll uncomfortably.

He lurched out into the hallway and met Peter in a bathrobe with tousled wet hair, coming back from the bathroom.

"There are clean towels by the tub," was all Peter said, as if finding Neal in his house at six in the morning on a weekday was perfectly normal.

"I ..." Neal began, and then stopped. He definitely needed to ask what had happened, but he was terribly afraid that even phrasing the question would reveal too much.

Peter sighed. "You drugged yourself to retrieve the memories of your session with Dr. Summers," he said, reciting it so quickly that Neal had a deeply unpleasant feeling that Peter might have had to explain it before. "Go take a shower. El's making pancakes."

He felt marginally more human after showering, although he made a face at having to put back on his rumpled, slept-in clothes. He'd recovered a few scraps of memory in the shower, which unfortunately just confirmed his worst fears. Mozzie had given him a replica of Dr. Summers' drug ... he had some fragments of talking to Mozzie ... and then ... Mozzie had taken him to the Burkes? That didn't make any sense.

He stumbled downstairs. The brightly lit kitchen sent another spike of pain through his head. Elizabeth was flipping pancakes and Peter was lounging at the counter with a cup of coffee and the sports section, already dressed for work.

Neal shuffled to a chair, realizing in the process that he was still barefoot. "I really hope you're not planning on forcing me to go to the office like this."

"I ought to," Peter said. "It would be a good life lesson." Neal glared at him blearily; Peter was unfazed. "But, no, my plan was to drop you off at June's. This morning Jones and I are going over to Griffith's -- I'm actually meeting him there in about an hour -- and I don't think we need you along for that, especially in your current state."

Neal tried to work out a response, and finally just made an acknowledging sort of grunt.

Elizabeth set down a plate of pancakes and a glass of orange juice in front of him. Her hair swung past his face, which gave him a sudden memory-flash of telling her that she smelled nice. He really hoped that had been a dream, but had a bad feeling it probably wasn't.

"Aspirin?" Elizabeth asked.

"Oh, yes, please."

His stomach's response to the first bite of pancake was a bit questionable, but after two aspirin and a pancake he felt a lot better.

"We're not giving you pancakes to reward you for your behavior last night," Peter remarked, setting down a cup of coffee at his elbow: unsweetened with a dash of milk, just the way he liked it. "I want to make that entirely clear."

"Can I assume that you've lectured me, and I've been impressed by it, and we're all done with that part?" Neal asked hopefully.

"Not a chance," Peter said. He was trying to look stern and mostly succeeding. "We've got an entire drive uptown to talk about why drugging yourself, check that, letting Mozzie drug you is a bad idea."

"Isn't there an accounting scam we're supposed to be looking into?" Neal suggested.

"Don't forget, hon, Neal _did_ get the information you needed," Elizabeth said cheerfully, turning around from the sink.

Peter's face went through a complicated and rather amusing series of expressions. " _Thanks,_ hon."

"I did?" Neal said, brightening.

"Yes," Peter sighed. "You did. Which doesn't mean it was safe, intelligent, or appropriate. Or that you are ever going to do anything like that again." He hid his mouth behind his coffee cup and mumbled something that sounded like, "Well done."

Neal cupped a hand behind his ear. "What's that?"

"Get your shoes on," Peter said gruffly, and went to grab his jacket.


End file.
